William Butler Yeats--1865--1939 (born when Lincoln died)
Bio: 
•	Father an artist--believed in the religion of art, not Christianity. WBY explored mysticism, folklore, theosophy, spiritualism, and Neo-Platonism. Rosicrucian cult at some point in the 1890's. Quasi-mystical ideas a lot like Blakes, go back to Pre-Platonic beliefs.
•	Born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class. became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period, which sought to promote the spirit of Ireland's native heritage. 
•	deeply involved in politics in Ireland. Verse reflected a pessimism about the political situation in his country and the rest of Europe, paralleling the increasing conservativism of his American counterparts in London, Eliot and Pound. His work after 1910 was strongly influenced by Pound, becoming more modern in its concision and imagery
•	never abandoned his strict adherence to traditional verse forms. 
•	Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922
•	received Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of 73.

Early Poetry:  exposure to Pre-Raphaelites--poetry dreamy, evocative, and ethereal. Self-conscious romanticism--Spenser and Shelley and Blake important influences. Also descriptive nature poems in early period--beginning of Gaelic vocabulary.

Second Style: 
•	Irish nationalism leads to second style--popular, simple style. "Folly of Being Comforted"--combines the colloquial with the formal.
•	Maude Gonne in this period. Aristocratic elegance of Lady G's house--chaos into order--"Neo-Platonic dance of life." Looked down on Philistines--middle classes.
•	Middle period--National theatre--distrust of middle class. September 1913.  Supported Protestant landed class.
•	Pounds and Eliot's imagistic epigram (like JOnson) influences Wild Swans at Coole. 
•	1917 dreams of Yeats's wife (faked) gave him imagery of A Vision (1925, 37). 

Great period--symbolist - metaphysical poems. Probably not influenced by French symbolists; working concurrently. Didn't know much french.  The Winding Stair, Sailing to Byantium, etc. Lots of spinning imagery gyres, stairs, tops, spirals--philosophy of history and personality, but also means of resolvng contraries. "Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places we were but no longer are.” Yeats tries to escape from life to a calmer “eternity of life”, but later deconstructs former. 

Final period--return to wildness—Circus Animals Desertion--Returns to the "foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

Wild Swans at Coole 1916
•	Influence of imagist epigram. 
	
Easter 1916--1916
•	Prosey irregular 3-beat line. Beginnings of symbolism in this very accessible nationalist poem.  "All changed, changed utterly;/ A terrible beauty is born."
•	Symbol is of a heart turned to stone in the living stream--made into an evocative but unclear conceit

 The Second Coming--1920
•	Dissolution of civilization. Gyre (hard g) is a cycle of history. Russian revolution. Birth of X brought to  end the first cycle ("Babylonian mathematical starlight" 2000 B.C. to disolution of Greco-Roman culture.)
•	Ceremony of innocence--Prayer for my Daughter--ritual as the basis of civilized living 

Sailing to Byzantium—1927. Read together with Byzantium.  Symbol of artifice as opposed to nature--think about Blake’s Beulah vs. Eden, Stevens, Ashberry, as opposed to Wright--against civilization. 
•	Problem of being caught in "sensual music" of change--"salmon falls, the mackerel-crowded seas"--also the animal signified by fish as with Lowell. We forget "monuments of unaging intellect."
•	Youth/ Age: "An aged man is but a paltry thing,/ A tattered coat upon a stick"
•	Asks singing masters of my soul to "consume my heart away; sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal/ It knows not what it is, and gather me/ Into the artifice of eternity."

		Once OUT OF NATURE I shall never take
		My bodily form from any natural thing,
		But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
		Of hammered gold and gold enameling	
		To keep a drowsy Emperor awake		
		Or set upon a golden bough to sing	 
		To lords and ladies of Byzantium		
		Of what is past, or passing, or to come.	
•	Yeats thought in Byzantium "religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one, that architects and artificers...spoke to the mulitude in gold and silver" and art was "almost impersonal, almost perhaps without the consciousness of individual design, absorbed in their subject matter and that the vision of a whole people"--national poet; impersonality (of Stevens, not Eliot)

Byzantium—1930 (transitional poem period)

•	World of artifice is now seen as death and purging from mire and blood of LIFE. 
•	led on a spiritual journey into goldsmith's world of Sailing--from which he will take his form (bird=soul)
•	These turn out to be empty fires--An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve"-- a sterility than cannot keep the out the battering world of "mire and blood." But "the smithies break the flood, the golden smithies of the Emperor. /Marbles of the dancing floor [Platonic dance of life]/ Break bitter furies of compexity, / Those images that yet/ Fresh images beget:/ That dolphin torn, that gong-tormented sea."
•	Mortal "images" continue to beget others, since that is the nature of the Life world--byzantium shuns "whatever is begotten, born, or dies."

The Circus Animals' Desertion—1939 (late period)
•	Standard themes for poems and plays (circus animals) are gone. 

				Now that my ladder's gone,
		I must lie down where all the ladders start,
		In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Under Ben Bulben--elegy to self?--9/4/1938
•	Discusses how art organized thought, but how we fell away. Cycles of history reiterated.  Blake organized in a system, "but after that/ confusion fell upon our thought."
•	One elegy--imagining death is a part of what is embranced in final phase--returns to the cycle of the gyre, not "out of nature" but also a monument. This monument will not remain because it will be slowly worn away. Message will even fade:

		Under bare Ben Bulben's head
		In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
		An ancestor wa rector there
		Long years ago, a church stands near,
		by the road an ancient cross,
		No marble, no conventional phrase;
		On limestone quarried near the spot
		by his command these words are cut:
			Cast a cold eye
			On life, on death.
			Horseman, pass by!

•	Picks limestone because it wears away, not permanent like marble. So poem becomes his only permanent monument.